Counting on Ignorance

Once again, a top Bush Administration official is counting on the average American’s ignorance of recent history to make an assertion that would be laughable were it not such a direct affront to the truth. While visiting a “secret” US military facility in Tajikistan, Donald Rumsfeld blamed the resurgence of Afghan opium production on the Taliban:

“”Anytime there is that much money floating around and you have people like the Taliban, it gives them an opportunity to fund their efforts in various ways,” said the Secretary of Defense.

Of course, the Taliban government ended opium cultivation in Afghanistan in 2000, at the request of the US and UN and at the cost of impoverishing countless Afghan farmers. As those who read my reports from the war zone in 2001 know, it was the return of the Northern Alliance government–which led to the current U.S.-backed Karzai puppet regime–that prompted the current spike in drug production and smuggling across Central Asia.